Blair Howard

Two murders. A library. A century of secrets. When prominent Chattanooga businessman Augustus Aldridge III is found dead in his mansion’s library, Lt. Kate Gazzara discovers something chilling: nearly a century earlier, a young woman named Emily Caldwell was murdered in that same room. The...

Some Cases Are Personal. This One’s Deadly. Eight years ago, Luther McNeer was convicted of his wife’s brutal murder. The evidence was damning: his clothes were soaked in her blood, no signs of forced entry, and a sketchy alibi about sleeping through the entire ordeal. But his brother Vinny...

Kate Gazzara is back with three more compelling, shocking, and intense cases. Greed, revenge, jealousy, money, love, hate. Are all motives for murder and all in a day’s work for Lt. Kate Gazzara, a dedicated female detective in a world dominated by men. Caroline, Book 16 When detective Kate...

Maggie Hart, a student at UTC, was abducted on Labor Day. Her body was found five days later on the RiverPark. She’d been strangled. She wasn’t the first, nor would she be the last. Harry Starke, recovering from a near-death experience, is dragged reluctantly into an investigation that...

Twenty-one years ago, Harry Starke, on his first case as lead detective made a mistake, a mistake that sent an innocent man to prison for life. Now, haunted by the past, and with new evidence, he must finish what he started and find the real killer. A killer that will do anything to hide the...

What would you do if someone murdered your best friend and mentor? Private investigator Harry Starke owes his career to Frank Callahan, the tough-as-nails detective who trained him as a young cop. But when Frank is found brutally murdered in his own home, Harry can’t let it go. The crime scene...

Some secrets are better left buried. And someone’s willing to kill to keep it that way. Lt. Kate Gazzara didn’t get where she was by playing it safe. So when the limestone walls in Forrest’s Cave give up their grim secret—a skeleton entombed for over fifty years—she assigns her...

A late-night phone call. A voice from the past. An apparent suicide. The phone call came on a Tuesday evening in the middle of August. Harry Starke hadn’t heard from his old school friend in almost five years, and he hadn’t thought about him in almost as long. Tom Sattler wanted to meet, and...

Why was she on the bridge that terrible night? Who was she running away from? Why did she leap to her death in the murky waters below? Tabitha Willard was a beautiful, wealthy young woman with everything to live for, so why did she take her own life? What did powerful US Congressman Gordon...

Kelsey Hart is missing. She’s been missing for three years … … Is she dead or alive? When Kelsey Hart disappeared three years ago, her older sister, Brit, never gave up hope. But as time passed, and she heard nothing from her sister, she knew she needed help. Enter PI Harry Starke, the man...

Chickamauga: A Novel of the American Civil War is the story of a great battle of the Civil War and the people who fought it, many of them real and some of them the product of the author’s imagination. Chickamauga is a story of the heroism, selflessness, and frailty of the men whose deeds...

For More Than Ten Years She Lay Beneath the Floorboards of Hill House Who was she? Who put her there? Why did she have to die? Harry Starke vows to find the answers to those questions. But the trail has gone cold and Hill House is a desolate ruin with many secrets. To find the answers, Harry...

Ten years ago, Brice Manning committed suicide … or did he? He left a note, but his body was never found. What really happened to Brice Manning? In Liar Liar, Book 8 in the Harry Starke Genesis series, PI Harry Starke is tasked with solving the ten-year-old cold case of Brice Manning, a...

A respected gallery owner found dead at her desk. A sculptor murdered with his own tools. A gifted art student missing. What starts as a suspicious suicide spirals into a chilling investigation—and Lt. Kate Gazzara is on the case. In Chattanooga’s elite arts district, where priceless...

Some cases cut deeper than the badge. In Madison, Annie, and The Mystery of Forrest’s Cave, homicide detective Lt. Kate Gazzara faces the kinds of investigations that don’t just test her skill—they test her heart, her courage, and her limits. From the rain-slick streets of Chattanooga to...

An elite Iranian military unit. A missing tactical nuclear weapon. An aging Vietnam vet with a taste for violence. It began when an FBI informant was brutally gunned down outside a soccer stadium. A tactical nuclear weapon has gone missing somewhere in the Middle East, and is thought to have...

A sealed room. A murdered psychiatrist. A decades-old secret someone will kill to protect. When Dr. Marcus Holloway is found dead inside his locked office—surrounded by disturbing patient files from a long-buried experimental program—Captain Kate Gazzara is pulled into her most dangerous...

In 1982, ten-year-old Emma Jacobs disappeared while on her way home from school. Almost four decades later the case file lands on Kate Gazzara’s desk. A cursory review of the case quickly turns into a personal nightmare for her team member, Detective Anne Robar. Haunted by vague, shadowy...

“Stand absolutely still, Amanda,” she read, “and you won’t get hurt.” Two seconds later a bullet from a sniper’s rifle shattered the driver’s side window of her Lexus SUV. That’s how it began, early on a Friday morning when Amanda, Harry’s wife, found the note tucked under her...

A puzzling death, two dead lawyers, and another close call for Kate. When prominent defense attorney Madison Lombardi drops dead on the street outside her office of a perceived heart attack, no one pays much attention . . . Except for her husband. When a second attorney, her law partner, drops...